The national movement has launched over 350 housing campaigns,
he says, and the growing Atlanta group has won over 20 campaigns
locally--with many more ongoing. "These are people who need a place
to eat and sleep, and if we can fight the financial institutions
that treat our communities like ATMs, then it's a worthwhile
fight--even if it's not the pure revolution we're hoping for."

Grace Davie met Rev. Michael Ellick of New York's Judson
Memorial Church--one of the founders of Occupy Faith--at a spring
awakening in Central Park in 2012. "He said they were talking about
creating a Truth Commission on the 2008 financial crisis," she
recalls. She was impressed, and after she joined the group "one of
the first things I did was go to Albany with a number of faith
leaders to call for a moral budget."

She also got very involved in the ongoing planning for the Truth
Commission project, which is partly modeled on the Greensboro Truth
and Reconciliation Commission that investigated the killing of
anti-Ku Klux Klan protesters in 1979. Davies says she feels a
similar process could be applied to the 2008 financial
collapse.

"So many people were harmed by the foreclosure crisis--and about
14 million Americans are still facing foreclosure." She says the
group is hoping to create a space--like in Zuccotti--where people
can come together to talk about what happened to them, explore the
root causes, learn from one another, and come up with a plan of
action.

Moral Mondays is another idea the group has been interested in.
She says the event started in North Carolina, organized by faith
leaders and their allies. "Every Monday people go to the state
house and engage in civil disobedience to protest cuts to the
social service budget," Davie says. "We need new ways for people to
meet and become involved. And it may be that Moral Mondays could
provide that."

Right now she senses a new energy in Occupy Faith, and new
actions on the horizon. "When the social safety net is shredded,"
she notes, "it's the churches and faith communities that see the
effects and are asked to help." Communities of faith also have a
special language to express the ideas of love and nonviolence she
sees at the heart of Occupy. "I feel the actions I went to were
motivated not by hatred or anger, but by love. And if people
misunderstood or ridiculed them, that was something [we] were ready
to take."

Cathy O'Neil had a Ph.D. from Harvard and taught mathematics at
Barnard before a segue into finance in 2007 took her to a hedge
fund where she worked with former Harvard University president and
World Bank chief economist Larry Summers.

But he and others "clearly didn't understand the shadow banking
system--credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations
and mortgage-backed securities " the whole thing to do with the
housing bubble," she says. From her position at the center of the
crisis, she began to suspect that these supposedly brilliant
experts had no idea what they were doing.

The AIG card from '52 Shades of Greed.'"populumcaptn="Steve Simpson(image by Steve Simpson)DMCA

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O'Neill also saw the "too-big-to-fail banks" had little
incentive to change their way of doing business "because the
taxpayers were backing them up in case they got into trouble." So
about a month after Occupy started, she helped to organize an
Alternative Banking group to try to improve the financial system.
They've been meeting weekly ever since, dedicated to "agitating for
reform" by "educating the public about the current dysfunction."
The group's first big project was a deck of cards--"52 Shades of
Greed"--to celebrate their one-year anniversary. The idea started
when a member of the Alternative Banking group brought in a deck of
cards printed by the United States military that showed the
most-wanted members of Saddam Hussein's government. "Somebody said
'We should do this for bankers,'" O'Neill explains.

In September 2013 they launched their second major project,
publishing their
handbook OccupyFinance in hard copies
and on the web. It details how and why our financial system is
failing, and proposes strategies for giving the 99 percent a
representative voice in the political and regulatory processes. The
group has started a book club to publicize it, and members are
thinking about launching a public access TV show or organizing a
conference or speaker series.

Meanwhile, they continue to work on what they see as key
financial reform issues. "Right now we're focusing on
too-big-to-fail and too-big-to-jail as separate but related
problems. We're especially targeting HSBC this year--they were
responsible for outrageous money laundering for drug lords and
terrorists but only got slapped on the wrist."

London-born Nick Mirzoeff studied history at Oxford and at the
University of Warwick, where he got involved with British cultural
studies--"understanding contemporary culture from a political
perspective." After moving to the U.S. he started teaching at New
York University, and in his 2011 book The Right to
Look observed that "we face a choice between continuing to
authorize authority or democratizing democracy."